Episode #118: No Value, No Sale

We believe in our product and we are very knowledgeable about the facts, details, specs, etc. We launch straight into our presentation of the details with the buyer. They want to negotiate the price. Do we see the connection here, the entire catastrophe? Often salespeople are slogging it out, lowering the price, hurting their positioning of the brand, lowering their own commission. In Japan once we have established a low price for the product or service it is very difficult to move it up thereafter. What is missing?

The conversation isn’t hitting the high notes on value and instead is a pitch based on the details of the product. Japan isn’t the only place where this is an issue. Despite all of the resources available to American salespeople and the long history of consultative selling there, they are failing massively as well. According to a study by Accenture, called the “Death Of the Salesman”, buyers are not seeing the value of the proposition. In 77% of cases, the buyer found no value in the offer during the sales call. In a separate study by Forrester, they found that from the buyer’s judgment, 92% of salespeople didn’t understand their business.

These are pretty miserable figures, no matter which way you look at them. I haven’t seem any similar numbers for Japan, but based on my experience with salespeople here, I would guess they would only be worse. “Pitchpeople” is how we should properly term Japanese salespeople in my view. They are not asking the buyer questions and are zeroing in only on the details of the product.

As the Accenture and Forrester studies show we need to know our client’s business and we need to counter price objections by showing value. Excellent advice Greg and just how do we do that you might be thinking?

Knowing the client’s business these days is unbelievably more easy than in the past. Listed companies very nicely put up their annual reports on their websites. We can gain an understanding of the strategy and direction they are going and what are the major initiatives that are so attractive, we will part with our hard earned cash and buy their shares. Not that many Japanese are on LinkedIn, so this is a more difficult resource to use here, than in the West. There will be press coverage of companies, which we can search easily through Google. We may have other clients in the same industry and can probably assume many of the issues will be the same.

Even if we can’t get much publically available information, we can ask the client. Now in Japan, this is verboten, so Japanese pitchpeople don’t ask any questions of the buyer. The reason is the buyer is GOD in Japan and GOD won’t answer our questions, because we are impudent minks for having the temerity to ask anything. Well it is verboten if you play by God’s rules, so that is not a wise choice. Instead we can give our Credibility Statement and get permission that way. What is our Credibility Statement?

For example, if we take Dale Carnegie Japan, we could say “Dale Carnegie is a global corporate training company, which leads the field in soft skills training. An example of this would be XYZ company where we trained all their sales staff. They told me they got a 30% increase in sales as a result. Maybe we can do the same thing for you. In order for me to know if that is possible or not would you mind if I asked you a few questions?”.

Another approach might be, “Mr. Client, prior to this meeting I spent quite a bit of time researching your business, so that our talk today would be valuable and efficient. To my surprise it was very hard to find any publically available information on your company. Before we go any further, would you mind helping me to better understand if I can actually help you or not, by asking a few questions about your business?

Once we know what their issues are, we can make a judgment on what is the best solution for them from our lineup. We may in fact conclude that we are not a match for them. If so, we should not waste anyone’s time and we should go find someone we can help.

If they are a match, then having identified the issue we explain our solution. When doing this, we need to go beyond just the product spec. We MUST explain how these facts transform into benefits for them. That is not enough. A benefit applied is where they will understand the value to their business. If we leave this step out, they may not be convinced we can help them.

They next need proof of where we have done this for another client. Salespeople talk a lot, so clients have learnt to be skeptical of salesperson blather. After providing evidence we now ask them “how does this sound?”, to draw out any residual concerns, issues or related questions.

If we do this, we will be in the top 1% of successful salespeople in Japan without a doubt. We bring value to them and we show we understand their business. As the surveys have shown, this is what buyers are looking for. Let’s give it to them.